1. Field of the Invention
The present invention can be classified to air traffic control, and particularly to a tracking data fusion method in combined radar/ADS surveillance environment.
2. Description of Related Art
As air traffic grows rapidly (about 10% per year), current air traffic control system cannot handle it efficiently. To solve the accompanying problems, e.g., rising operational cost and arrival time delay, the International Civil Aircraft Organization (ICAO) established a FANS (Future Air Navigation Systems) committee to study and propose new techniques. FANS proposed new Communication, Navigation, Surveillance (CNS) techniques in 1991 to support future Air Traffic Management (ATM). Among these techniques, ADS-A (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Addressing) and ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) are new techniques for Surveillance.
In the future, radars, ADS-A and ADS-B will be simultaneously used in the surveillance environment. Therefore, current air traffic control system, which only uses radars to track aircrafts, must be modified so that it can combine multiple surveillance data to track aircrafts in the new surveillance environment. The present invention provides a way to satisfy this requirement.
The object of the present invention is to provide a tracking data fusion method in combined radar/ADS surveillance environment. The proposed method defines (1) tracking states, such as initiated, established, tracked, coast, and terminated; (2) track types, such as search, beacon, accurate, ADS-accurate, ADS-beacon, and ADS; (3) track types transition rules. The proposed method can provide aircrafts the best available flight services in a combined radar/ADS surveillance environment.
The various objects and advantages of the present invention will be readily understood in the following detailed description.